Rainbow (Loose) Glitter Gradient!

8 May 2013

I was so in love with my Neon Water Marble nails I kept them on for much longer than I usually do. When coming up with something to replace them, I wanted to stick with being colourful, and eye-catching.

I had bought a set of loose glitters from the Dollar Store a while back, and figured I’d try something with those. What I came up with was a sparkly rainbow gradient;

and this is how I did it:

First, got all my colors, tools and glitters together. I’ve been meaning to use more Base Coats to try and stop putting colour directly on my nails as they’re starting to stain – so I first put a layer of Sally HansenCrystal Beading, which is a very nice pearlecent blue/purple leaning holo… but whatever, it was getting completely covered up by my base gradients anyways.

You can probably skip this next step if you want a more translucent glitter look. I wanted to have a colour base to use as a guide, and so I did a quick and sloppy coat of sheer glittery base gradients, I simply used a Q-tip to apply each.

Next up it was time to add the glitter. I simply mixed the glitter with a clear coat (Wet N’ Wild Wild Shine, coz it was $1), and used a Q-Tip to apply to my nail. Doing the gradient parts was super easy, using the colours as a guide, and the sandy texture mixed easily and well.

It ended up a gritty sparkly mess but looked much better after cleanup and some top coats. I cleaned the edges, and added two coats of Sally Hansen “Urban Chic” (my most favorite rainbow/holo/glitter polish), before finishing with my favorite (cheap) top coat, which really smoothed everything out!

Trying to capture the Sparkliness was mega difficult, so here are three sets of photos under different lighting conditions.

Indoor

Sunlight

It was pretty easy, and ended up looking pretty spectacular, I’ll very likely do this again a few times this summer!